Pejk Malinovski: This Room (2018)Virtual-reality work. Can be experienced at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces throughout the exhibition run. Was shown at Copenhagen Central Station November 12th–25th 2018

In the summer of 2015, Europe experienced the arrival of record numbers of refugees and migrants, including people from war-torn Syria. Images of people fleeing through Europe filled the media. But where did they go, all these refugees walking along motorways, arriving by train, bus and truck, setting up a provisional camp at Copenhagen Central Station under the glare of media attention?In answer to this question, poet and sound artist Pejk Malinovski created a new virtual-reality work specifically for TRANSIT. This Room is about the subsequent fates of refugees in refugee camps all over Denmark. Camps located in former prisons, hospitals, schools, camping grounds and temporary structures built to house refugees in remote, isolated areas far from the media spotlight.

Malinovski grew close to a refugee camp up in the 1980s. He remembers playing with Turkish, Iranian and Palestinian childhood friends from the camp, well aware that they might not be there the next day if they had been transferred elsewhere. Malinovski describes the situations he remembers as a kind of involuntary state of transit and limbo: ‘One of my strongest memories from this camp were the small rooms where 8-10 people would sleep on bunk beds, all their belongings stuffed in big suitcases. The room itself was a kind of suitcase, stuck between destinations’.

This Room is a virtual-reality installation where two participants at a time can sit on a bench in a narrow room, wearing a VR headset. Using the highly immediate sensory visual universe of virtual reality technology, the participants are led into a fictional space and given a very real, physical sense of the psychological stress, fear and uncertainty that dominate the transit experience of many refugees. The room is based on refugees’ memories of the real-life transit zones and rooms they have occupied while waiting to hear the verdict on their asylum application. This Room can thus be described as a memory-based mapping of the rooms refugees have passed through and stayed in for longer or shorter periods of time since they left Copenhagen Central Station and practically disappeared from the media spotlight.Pejk Malinovski was born in Denmark in 1976. He lives and works in New York, USA.

Pejk Malinovski: This Room (2018)Virtual-reality work. Can be experienced at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces throughout the exhibition run. Was shown at Copenhagen Central Station November 12th–25th 2018

In the summer of 2015, Europe experienced the arrival of record numbers of refugees and migrants, including people from war-torn Syria. Images of people fleeing through Europe filled the media. But where did they go, all these refugees walking along motorways, arriving by train, bus and truck, setting up a provisional camp at Copenhagen Central Station under the glare of media attention?In answer to this question, poet and sound artist Pejk Malinovski created a new virtual-reality work specifically for TRANSIT. This Room is about the subsequent fates of refugees in refugee camps all over Denmark. Camps located in former prisons, hospitals, schools, camping grounds and temporary structures built to house refugees in remote, isolated areas far from the media spotlight.

Malinovski grew close to a refugee camp up in the 1980s. He remembers playing with Turkish, Iranian and Palestinian childhood friends from the camp, well aware that they might not be there the next day if they had been transferred elsewhere. Malinovski describes the situations he remembers as a kind of involuntary state of transit and limbo: ‘One of my strongest memories from this camp were the small rooms where 8-10 people would sleep on bunk beds, all their belongings stuffed in big suitcases. The room itself was a kind of suitcase, stuck between destinations’.

This Room is a virtual-reality installation where two participants at a time can sit on a bench in a narrow room, wearing a VR headset. Using the highly immediate sensory visual universe of virtual reality technology, the participants are led into a fictional space and given a very real, physical sense of the psychological stress, fear and uncertainty that dominate the transit experience of many refugees. The room is based on refugees’ memories of the real-life transit zones and rooms they have occupied while waiting to hear the verdict on their asylum application. This Room can thus be described as a memory-based mapping of the rooms refugees have passed through and stayed in for longer or shorter periods of time since they left Copenhagen Central Station and practically disappeared from the media spotlight.Pejk Malinovski was born in Denmark in 1976. He lives and works in New York, USA.